Tag Archives: dominant 7 chords

How I Approach Improvising on Dominant 7th Chords – Bass Practice Diary – 22nd June 2021

I’ve mentioned many times in previous videos that jazz musicians love dominant chords. They love them because there’s so many different ways you can play on them. Depending on the context, you can get away with playing any note on a dominant chord. But it doesn’t help you learn how to improvise if you think “play anything”. It helps if you think about strategies for improvisation. I think everyone who improvises has at least some kind of strategy. And a more experienced improviser probably has many strategies to draw upon. So when you’re practicing improvisation, don’t just pick your favourite strategy. Practice as many strategies as you can think of. And then you never know what you might discover.

Strategies for Improvising on Dominant 7th Chords

In this video I’ve tried to include many of the common strategies for playing on dominant 7th chords. And this is by no means an exhaustive list. Some of these ideas I’ve featured in videos before. Click here to find my video about chromatic approach notes. This video is about the altered scale. And this one is about combining diminished and blues scale sounds.

To me, every scale is a sound. Or it creates a particular sound against a specific chord. So, when I’m improvising, I’m thinking about sounds, not scales. But, having said that, all of these scales form those sounds, so that’s why we think about scales when we study improvisation strategies. The important thing to remember, is that when you’re learning any of these scales. You are not just learning a fingering or a pattern on the fretboard. You are trying to learn the sound that it creates against a dominant chord. Here are the scales.

Scales for Improvising on Dominant Chords

Bass Blog

I VI II V Chord Progressions – Part 2 – Bass Practice Diary 87

December 17, 2019 jccoxjazzbass

I VI II V Chord Progressions on 6-string Bass – Part 2 – Bass Practice Diary – 17th December 2019

This week I’m revisiting my introduction to I VI II V chord progressions on 6-string bass video. There are so many ways that you can alter and substitute chords in a I VI II V sequence. Jazz musicians will often alter and add to the progression so much, that it’s almost impossible to tell that it was ever a I-VI-II V progression in the first place.

Chord substitutions

There really aren’t any rules when it comes to substituting chords. There are certain standard substitutions that are very common, such as the tritone substitution, which I looked at in my last video. But, honestly, you can substitute any chord for any other one that you like the sound of. A lot of it depends on the musical context that you’re playing the substitution in, but also it comes down to opinion. What sounds interesting to some people, will sound odd to others.

This week I’m just going to take you through some familiar chord substitutions and additions to I VI II V’s. These examples go quite a bit further than the examples in my previous video. But, believe me, you can take these ideas much further out than this.

The I VI II V examples

I created this first example by taking the III-VI-II-V example from my previous video and turning all the chords into dominant 7th chords. I then applied tritone substitutions to the VI and II chords. Then I added whatever extensions and alterations that I liked the sound of.

III – VI – II – V – I chord progression with dominant 7th substitutions

Once you have four dominant 7th chords like this, you can come up with so many variations just by applying tritone substitutions.

My next example derives from the first example. I’ve simply turned the E7, Eb7 and G7 chords into II-V’s. Meaning that I’ve added minor 7th chords before each dominant 7th chord. Each minor 7th has a root note that is a 4th below (or a fifth above) the root note of the dominant 7th chord. I’ve altered the VI chord to make it a major 7th instead of a dominant 7th chord. This completes a II-V-I in the key of Ab major, which is a strange thing to find in a chord progression in C major, but it works!